Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Broadway has long spoken in English accents, at first because audiences admired Britain's elegant actors and urbane playwrights, then because producers came to prefer works that had been pretested in London, where costs are cheaper and audiences perhaps more forgiving. In the early '80s, dramas by Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer dominated the Tony Awards for plays; while in the past few years, Trevor Nunn's staging and Andrew Lloyd Webber's melodies have provided the very definition of hit musicals. This year, though, a clog is developing in the transatlantic pipeline. While London offers the customary array...
Hispanic playwrights are only the most prominent part of a fast-growing Latin presence in the U.S. theater. Actor Raul Julia, whose career expanded from low-budget off-Broadway shows into films, regularly returns to the New York stage to play such classics as The Tempest and Arms and the Man. Tony Plana and Nestor Serrano have given some of the most noteworthy off-Broadway and regional performances of recent years. And Choreographer Graciela Daniele, a Tony nominee for The Pirates of Penzance and Drood, turned to directing Borges-inspired musical theater in the off-Broadway hit Tango Apasionado...
...giving freshness to what could otherwise seem wearily familiar. Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse deftly used a pan-Hispanic ambience and interpolated / Spanish phrases to distinguish its production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves from the Tony-winning Broadway version, seen nationally...
These emotionally vibrant, and frequently violent, images come from an emerging cadre of playwrights who are perhaps the most eagerly cultivated new voices in the American theater. Like blacks a generation ago, Hispanics have become the ethnic group of the moment, both off-Broadway and at many of the nation's foremost regional theaters. From Manhattan's Public Theater through the Milwaukee Repertory Theater to the Los Angeles Theater Center, they are using their new ascendancy to reach main stages and middle-class white audiences...
Reinaldo Povod's first full-length play, Cuba and His Teddy Bear, included a street-poet character who was widely seen as a tribute to Miguel Pinero. And like Pinero's. Short Eyes and Valdez's Zoot Suit, Povod's explosive play made the move to Broadway. The script was helped by the casting of Robert De Niro in his first New York stage role in 16 years. Its central character, like the author, was a bright and literate kid who turned to drugs just because they were so pervasive in his environment. Povod, 28, admits that he was addicted...